A support engineer supporting vendor applications often needs information from a customer to solve the customer's problem. Currently, when that happens, the support engineer contacts the customer by phone, fax, email, etc., indicating the necessary information and detailing the steps and data that must be retrieved. The customer, on the other side, must perform the prescribed steps correctly and send the data to the vendor/support engineer, which requires that the customer setup access and notify the support engineer when all steps have been accomplished. The whole process of interaction between the support engineer and the customer results in various problems, including, for example, 1) contacting the correct individual at the customer site is often difficult and time consuming 2) the customer doesn't always follow the instructions carefully which results in incorrect or incomplete data 3) the instructions may be unclear, incomplete, or incorrect which results in incomplete and/or incorrect data 4) the chain of events between the support engineer and the customer takes time, e.g., several days up to a week, which can result in stale data 5) setting up a communication link between the customer and the vendor often requires paper work and time 6) the customer must remember to notify the support engineer when the work has been completed or the process stalls.
In various situations, the customer site includes electronic systems to provide the information to the support engineer. However, these approaches are static because the process requires the system to have existing list of items to collect for the support engineer. If items not in the list are to be collected, then it takes a long time, e.g., up to months, to update the system for collection capabilities of such new items, including shipping the new set of collection package to the customer, installing the package into the customer's system, etc.